I'm about to head off to work, where, wonderfully, I found a copy of the Mauss [The Gift] in my library's stacks. I will read some during quiet moments today and get back to you about it, maybe... In the meantime, tell me how you came to think of FAAN as a concise "project" (at your leisure of course) -- or how you started to think about giving and exchange vis-à-vis our habits here in the hub of art world commerce?Adam Simon: I've always split my focus between my studio work, which is mostly painting, and projects which deal with how art is disseminated. From what I can tell, you seem to have a similar split focus. The Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN) refers directly back to Four Walls, the exhibition space/artists forum which Michele Araujo and I started in 1984 and I later co-directed with Mike Ballou. Both FAAN and Four Walls were propelled by a certain degree of frustration. With Four Walls it was frustration at the lack of live sites for dialogue between artists, particularly ones that were also exhibition sites. With FAAN it was my realization that a surplus of good art somehow coexists with a scarcity of people owning art. I also had to remove a couple of large, early paintings from my mother's house in Boston because she was moving and I didn't want to store or destroy them. That was the immediate impetus. By the way, thanks for referring me to Paul Chan's audio project. I like the way it resists definition as either a service or an artwork. I think of FAAN that way except that, as an artwork, FAAN is extremely collaborative. At this point it is being shaped by a lot of people.

Yes, I'm beginning to feel it taking off, or taking shape... Today I had my first actual handing-off of a painting to a fellow named Eben who is a writer and teaches English at CUNY. He is the first of 6 adopters, and actually first emailed me from AiG during the opening. He later came to the fair use conference and said hullo after my panel. Today he came up to the Met where I work, we got sandwiches and sat in the park and talked for maybe an hour and a half. Then I got him a button to go see the Kara Walkershow / extravaganza (speaking of things shaped by many people!). I'm feeling very "high" -- one has the power to shape a "transaction" differently once money and market values are taken out of the equation. There seems to be a fast-track to genuine discussion... somehow, several layers of the usual bullshit vanish from the moment the adopters open themselves up in their letters; that is what they seem to do, and maybe what it takes; that is the intimate level at which the exchange is taking place...

I remember Eben from the opening. He was interesting. I remember he said that he wanted contemporary art for his students to be around. After I said that to you yesterday about FAAN being shaped by a lot of people, I saw that you had used your homepage to invite comments from artists and adopters on what they think FAAN is all about. As far as I know, yours is the first instance of a FAAN homepage being used for something other than the artists' images and related text. I like it. At some point, during all my promotional claims about how FAAN would be this or accomplish that I realized that no one, including me, had any idea what would actually occur.

Eben is lovely; he gave me a short story he'd written after we finished lunch. :-) Funny, your webmaster (John Weir) emailed me right after I posted that "hey FAAN people"
thing – he said he thought it a nice way around the lack (so far) of an
interface for such an interaction and wanted to know if there was
anything else I might need (!) - I told him I had given away my last
artwork for adoption that day and my homepage seemed so sad and bare!

I guess also it's an almost unconscious impulse for me to do something like that... all those years yammering on list-serves
and, more recently, blogs; I assume that online communication must go
in both directions. In any case, it occurs to me that FAAN has only
just begun -- it could keep going and going, and morph and develop into
-- who knows what?!

Fantastic.

Well, it's definitely going to get bigger. I
guess it's natural to fear that something will be lost as that happens.
I'm hoping that the idea is simple enough so that the flavor will last.
Maybe it is possible to instill a different model in the minds of the
general public. Artists are thought of by many as hucksters and
overnight success stories. If the public has to reconcile that idea
with multiple acts of random generosity, well, that might be
significant.

Adam,

Sorry
to leave this conversation for a few days -- things have been hectic!
I managed to squeeze in a lovely 45min beer at my studio with my second
adopter, a shy, scholarly looking architect gent. I also squeaked into an opening Saturday whereCarrie Yamaoka has a piece, where I happened to be introduced to your brother!

It seems to me that people pine after new models, even if they get
confused. I love "multiple acts of random generosity." Okay, dashing
off again. More soon. I think FAAN could grow into a giant and
longstanding many-armed giant... Joy

July 30, 2006

On August 12 CiNE concludes its yearlong performance project, ACTORS AT WORK, with "PARTY" at the Ohio Theater.

In ACTORS AT WORK, the latest in a series of post-theatrical interventions, CiNE filed performance contracts for union actors to go to their day jobs. In the process, the line between "job performance" and "performance," workplace and theater, vocation and day job is both clarified and hopelessly blurred.

Jeff Biehl in WORD PROCESSOR

"PARTY," the concluding event, features documentation & photographs from the ACTORS AT WORK productions of BABYSITTER, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, and PILATES INSTRUCTOR, among others. It also features alchohol, good conversation (presumably), music by THE CHILDREN…, and a roughly even mix of people who are really acting, and people who are acting genuine.

Monday August 14 - Friday August 18, Opening Mon 6-8pmP.P.O.W. Gallery in ChelseaSelected photos and videos from "This Delicate Monster" in "Risky Business" a group show curated by Dana Dale Lee about play and risk.

"That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our
forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad's civil war
is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the
Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what
Americans would have the stomach to watch?"

AS America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle
joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the
last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle's
gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war
canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than
happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the
Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but
you won't catch anyone saying it's Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the
Big Three networks' evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has
fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the
television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of
NBC read aloud a "shame on you" e-mail complaint from the parents of
two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about
the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day,
easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri
al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last
week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five
sentences about the speech on ABC's "World News." The networks know a
rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki's
short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004
campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with
White House-scripted talking points about the war's progress.
Propaganda stunts, unlike "Law & Order" episodes, don't hold up on
a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t
happenstance. It's a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For
reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps
getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever.
The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. "It is depressing to
pay attention to this war on terror," said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on
July 18. "I mean, it's summertime." Americans don’t like to lose,
whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how
many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The
specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off
Iraq. The larger issue is that we don't know what we — or, more
specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops
— are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the
stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in
Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else.
It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread
of a coherent plot.

Certainly there has been no shortage of
retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the
administration's initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam's mushroom
clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We’ve been told that
the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region
safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these
justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by
Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object
lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined
the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel,
while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.

But
it's the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation
that still might justify staying the course in Iraq — as a humanitarian
mission on behalf of the Iraqi people — that is most revealing of what
a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. [read on...]

What would our lives would
be like if Dada's radically anarchic
aesthetic had taken over? Would people be proclaiming abstract sound
poetry on street corners? Would they wander about, like the notoriously
free-spirited Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, bizarrely arrayed
in pilfered goods and castoffs—a bra made of two tin cans tied with
string, rows of curtain-ring bracelets pinched from Woolworth's, a
bustle of electric lights? Perhaps they'd hole up, like Kurt Schwitters
building his Merzbau, an installation cobbled together from bits of
urban and natural detritus. Perhaps every public gathering would become
a provocation.

Dada Triumphs!, a 1920 photocollage by Raoul Hausmann,
includes a map with the word "DADA" emblazoned across the northern
hemisphere, announcing this movement's vast territorial ambitions. In
fact, though Dada's reach extended well beyond the heart of Europe, it
stopped far short of world domination. "Dada" focuses on international
networks of peripatetic artists responding maniacally to the twin
debacles of World War I and the unrelenting pressures of
industrialization. Dada began during wartime, among artists who had
sought refuge in Switzerland and a still-unaligned United States; by
1924 it had fizzled, sacrificed to the internecine Parisian struggles
that gave rise to Surrealism, its more popular successor.

Today, the ghosts of Dada must content themselves with a
single province: the art world, which remains largely under the sway of
Marcel Duchamp, Dada's sly patron saint and most elegant prankster.
With a curatorial nod to chaos, the show boasts two separate entrances,
signaling Dada's dual origins: the raucous, proto-performance-art
soirees at the Café Voltaire in Zurich, and the radical experiments
Duchamp conducted while in exile in New York.

Enter through Zurich, and you hear archival recordings of
someone loudly declaiming nonsensical syllables and encounter Swiss
artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp's fantastical marionettes for an 18th-century
play that the Dadaists had updated to reflect their own psychoanalytic
preoccupations. The effect is both charmingly artisanal and—due perhaps
to the ineffable nature of performance—elusive. Enter via New York, and
you're confronted with Duchamp's readymades, those industrially
produced objects that, once removed from their contexts, acquired the
status of aesthetic icons, and now suggest a sort of Big Bang theory of
contemporary art.

Either way, there are plenty of pleasurable surprises, like the
Baronness's airy portrait of Duchamp—a temporary assemblage, surviving
only in a photograph, of a champagne glass topped with a clock spring
and feathers. And there's enough to still jar your senses. Dada, after
all, had crawled out of the trenches; several of its male artists had
been wounded in combat or suffered from shellshock. Others, like the
German political satirist John Heartfield, feigned insanity to avoid
military service, and the habit, once adapted, became hard to shake.
Mayhem was their antidote to a world gone mad; they aimed, in the words
of poet/provocateur Richard Huelsbeck, for an art that would "let
itself be thrown by the explosions of last week."

Perhaps because last week, the drumbeat of war was gaining
momentum, Berlin Dada's highly politicized interventions seemed
particularly apt: Hannah Hoch's photomontage of two paunchy Weimar
officials in their bathing suits, or George Grosz's magnificently
grotesque portrait of the German Republic's president, transformed
through photomontage and collage to evoke the mutilated visages of
veterans filling Berlin's streets. Also wonderful are the movies on
display, bidding belated adieu to the 19th century, like Hans Richter's
hilarious Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927), in which a bunch of
men chase vainly after their bowler hats. And the entire show evoked a
deep nostalgia for bohemia, which the forces of capital long ago pushed
to the margins of our urban centers. Artists now go to graduate school
to have experiences that were once available in Greenwich Village.
Would that we could bring them back.